


Small Sins for the Motherland

by cabled



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Identity Issues, Inaccurate portrayals of Saint Petersburg, M/M, Soviet Union
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-01
Updated: 2014-04-01
Packaged: 2018-01-17 18:21:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1397872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cabled/pseuds/cabled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier observes the changing identities of his beloved city, and reflects on who he's been. Meanwhile, Steve Rogers attempts to reconcile the past with the present.</p>
<p>"The world moved forward, and still, Leningrad was built on the same old bones as Petrograd, as Saint Petersburg. The same snow returned faithfully, year after year, and covered over the ice cream spires of the Church on Spilt Blood."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Sins for the Motherland

**Small Sins for the Motherland**  

 

Leningrad, 1987. From the first, the Winter Soldier remembers this city, his hearth, his homeland. A city built on the bones of thousands: femurs sealed in calcified arches, skulls in the bridges that spanned the black water of the Neva. Citizens waded through the streets with a certain apathy, trading ironic glances, stalling, waiting for a new world to emerge. Russia forever, for better or for worse.

 

Citizen, they greeted one another with exaggerated tilts of the head, obsequious salutes. Others marched on solidly, desperately, unwaveringly.

 

Who they were changed from moment to moment. Sometimes even the citizens forgot themselves, trapped in the vision of a future that never arrived.

  

In the past few years, the Soviets had launched several men and women into the vacuum of space. Cosmonauts circled the earth like moons, observing the shoots and flares of a dying sun, and declared their wishes for world peace. The world moved forward, and still, Leningrad was built on the same old bones as Petrograd, as Saint Petersburg. The same snow returned faithfully, year after year, and covered over the ice cream spires of the Church on Spilt Blood.

  

* * *

 

November 2014. A quiet night in the nation’s capital. The President was currently out for a meeting at Camp David, and the Winter Soldier had just successfully infiltrated the ground floor of an old apartment building three blocks away from Pennsylvania Avenue. He leaned against the door frame of the bedroom and posed the big question.

 

“So, Captain. Who do you think I am?”

  

Captain America usually had answers for these kinds of things. But not tonight. The Captain was snoring, his mouth slightly open, blond hair sticking out in all directions.

 

For a brief instant, the Winter Soldier was overcome by the surge of some strange emotion. He could take a knife straight to the Captain’s chest, the Winter Soldier thought idly. He could, maybe he would.

 

_Who do you think you are, to tell me what I am?_

 

The Captain wasn’t on his kill list, hadn’t been for thirty years. Still, he could do it, he had the skill. No one was invincible.

  

The Winter Soldier departed through the back window like a shadow, as if he was never there.

 

 Just a quiet night in the nation’s capital.

  

The Captain slept on.

 

* * *

  

Detaching the silencer on his Kalashnikov from the eighteenth floor of the Atlantic Tower, the Winter Soldier, formerly James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, watched over his beloved city, Saint Petersburg (prev. Leningrad, Petrograd, Saint Petersburg.) Down below, the citizens of a new empire hurried on with the same mix of optimism and irony that had sustained the country for the past seventy years, and then some.

 

The Winter Soldier had a feeling he knew what kind of man Bucky Barnes had been. He felt that they were in fact very much alike. No one ever came to be something out of nothing, and they shared the same brain besides. As long as he could remember being himself, the Winter Soldier remembered feeling the bones of Bucky’s right arm aching inexplicably underneath the new metal. He hadn’t known about Bucky then- only the ghost of some forgotten pain.

 

* * *

 

 “Do you know what he was like?” Steve asked Natasha one evening, as they tied up the ends of a quick mission in Belgrade.

 

She quirked a sardonic eyebrow in his direction, and went back to checking the faint pulse of the unconscious District Council Chairman. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

 

“I mean, I don’t know. What do you remember? Did you know him?”

 

She sighed. “Help me get this guy outside.” She reached under the Chairman’s arms and grabbed ahold, while Steve hoisted him up by his legs, and together they manhandled the Chairman up to the roof to wait for the arrival of the helicarrier. The esteemed Chairman could stand to go a little easier on the dumplings.

 

“Okay, Nat, mission accomplished. Now come on. Tell me what you know.”

 

She shrugged. “I was the better Soviet. But he was the better Russian.”

 

Steve shook his head; he didn’t follow.

 

“Back then, I was- devoted. Single-minded. I believed in the cause, we all did. But-“ She paused. “Hold on. Did you disable the bomb under the sink?”

 

“In the kitchen? Yeah. –Wait. I never got- what about the one in the-?“ 

 

“Bathroom,” they said together.

 

They looked at each other. They ran for the door.

 

Two uncontained explosions and a messy cleanup later, Steve and Natasha found themselves back on the roof, waiting with the unconscious Chairman for the helicarrier to arrive. “Fury’s going to hand our asses to us for that, you realize,” Natasha barked. “Careful, Rogers, or I’ll start to think you can’t hack it.”

  

Steve winced. “I really am sorry, Nat. Covert ops isn’t exactly my strong-suit.”

 

“Yeah, no shit.“

 

“I’ll take you out to lunch?”

 

“Save it for Fury,” Natasha said.

 

"I will," Steve promised. "Just- I know you're trying to avoid the subject, Nat. But I don't even know him anymore. Tell me about him. Please?"

 

Maybe it was something in his expression, or maybe it was the 'please,' that finally made her relent.

 

“The Red Room took a lot from him, understand. From all of us. But even the Directors knew that only so much can be taken away before the whole structure collapses. Everything’s built on what came before.” She remembered him saying that once, about his home. About Leningrad.

 

“If you didn’t have the right personality to start with, you wouldn’t make it. Yasha and I survived because we were born to survive. But he was different. They said they liked him, because he was a true Russian.” That was the doctors for you. Let it never be said that they didn't have a sense of irony.

 

Steve shook his head. “But he’s not. Wasn’t.”

 

“It’s hard to explain. But he _was_. He was Russian, just like you’re-“ –she gestured at the Cap in his full star-spangled getup- “-so American. Overconfident, righteous, bit of a loudmouth.”

 

“Gee, thanks. You’re a treat, yourself.”

 

She ignored him. “The Winter Soldier was- zealous. Devoted, yes. But also kind of detached. Ironic. He believed in what he did, but he had his doubts. That was part of the reason they kept him in cryo so much.”

 

“I thought the Soviets didn’t leave room for doubt.”

 

“They didn’t want to. But the doubt was a part of him. He was too useful to them with his mind still partly intact for them to want to risk completely erasing his personality. And at the end, when everything was falling apart, then we all had our doubts.”

 

Towards the end, even after the wall had fallen and the Red Room had lost its funding for human experimentation, they still believed. Or rather, they wanted to believe. They shared some great love for the old decrepit hopes, shared the sense that their work was doomed to fail.

 

August 1988. She could still hear his doubts, whispered into the shell of her ear: that they would be turned against each other, that they would die, or worst of all, they would live and see the dream tarnished, corrupted, turned to ash. His fingers stroking bitter comfort down her back. He’d spoken her name so softly. _Natalia, look, the sun is burning out._

 

“He was a true romantic,” she said.

 

Steve cleared his throat, shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Natasha gave him a sidelong glance from behind the sweep of her red hair.

 

“Jealous?”

 

“What? No. Why?”

 

“Well, he _was_ an excellent lover.”

  

Steve coughed, the tips of his ears flushed red. “O-oh?”

 

The Black Widow looked at him for a moment, mouth curved into a little smile. “At least,” she said, “from what I’ve heard.”

  

"Yeah," said Steve. “I’ve heard that, too."

  

* * *

  

Once, when he was thirteen, Steve lay awake in the quiet space that was an early Sunday morning before church, and vigorously jerked off to the ecstatic vision of his best friend sucking on the breasts of one Suzy Stuyvesant, the most perfectly gorgeous girl of the ninth grade. Well, something was decidedly unholy about the whole thing. Steve thanked the Lord that he was Protestant and therefore not required to confess his sins to any priest, only to God. He then proceeded to feel horribly guilty for the next three days without any need for prompting.

  

Funny how some sins seem so small in retrospect.

  

* * *

  

The Soldier was once reasonably certain that his detachment and deep underlying sense of the cruel irony of the universe had derived either from some dissociation caused by the innumerable torture sessions he underwent in the Red Room, or possibly from the Soldier’s distinctly Russian disposition.

  

He had since realized that not only was he probably born thinking that way, but also that he had been right about the cruel irony bit all along. But tread lightly. His life wasn’t that bad. Sure, he’d killed good people. He’d killed some bad ones too. There was a sort of balance to it all. He wasn’t sorry for existing.

 

* * *

  

The Winter Soldier leans over Captain America's bed.

 

The Captain is awake. His eyes look gray in the pre-dawn gloom. He wipes the drool from the corner of his mouth. Somehow, the Winter Soldier had forgotten Steve used to do that. “Wow,” Steve says. “What are you doing here? Is there a hit out on me or something?”

 

“Thought I’d pay a visit to an old friend.”

 

“At four in the morning? You always were a little funny in the head.”

 

The Soldier shoots him a sardonic look, but leans over, touches Steve’s shoulder carefully. The metal of his fingers presses light and cool through Steve’s shirt.

 

“I could gut you like a fish,” says the Winter Soldier. “But I probably won’t.”

 

“A confession for the ages,” says Steve.

 

He grips the Winter Soldier’s elbow and surges up from the bed to kiss him on the mouth. Two skeletons, alive under the flesh. They kiss softly for a long minute, and Steve slides a hand under the Winter Soldier’s shirt and runs a thumb back and forth over a warm stretch of belly.

 

When they pull back to look at each other, something about the look on Steve’s face makes the Soldier’s stomach clench up in an angry twist. Steve’s hands move to smooth the Soldier’s cheek, his hip- suddenly, it’s too much. The Winter Soldier bolts for the back window and is gone.

 

“Idiot,” Steve pants into the darkness, and thinks.

 

He thinks about Suzy Stuyvesant, who might still be living for all he knows, and about the summer of 1935, the summer he turned thirteen, eighty years ago. He thinks about Natasha that same year, eight years old and slowly freezing in the Red Room. He thinks about Bucky’s Russian soul, about Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy. They’d had to read War and Peace for school, but neither of them had gotten more than thirty pages in. He thinks about Leningrad- no, Saint Petersburg. He’s never been. He’d like to see it sometime. The city of bones. The Winter Soldier’s breath on his lips, his question in the dark: “who do you think I am?” He thinks he doesn’t know. What idiots. Idiots. His heart won’t stop pounding in his ears.

 


End file.
